EDIT: With thanks to u/code@lemmy.mayes.io, I have a solution for cleaning up the one table that is growing ridiculously in size and that is the activity table. A TRUNCATE activity; command cleaned that right up. A word of caution is in order because the Lemmy instance must be shutdown completely and only the postgres container running if you’re using docker.
As a new Lemmy admin, I think I really need to learn PostgreSQL administration because I need a way to keep my database from ballooning in size and there are no management tools built yet for it. Would someone be so kind as to recommend a good website for learning PostgreSQL? This would also help me maintain my mastodon instance.
Well thank you kindly!
Look at vacumn command. Also dbeaver is a teally good gui tool. Right now there is one table thats the main cause (i think its called activity but dont quote me on that there was a post about it)
That table is mainly for debugging as it logs every action in activitypub your instance does. I truncate it once a week and vacumn it (shrinks the disk space used). Caution. You must shut down lemmy before doing so. I run containers so i stop all except postgres and clean it up.
looks like the devs are on it.
After that commit my database dump went from around 1.1G to 260M
You are exactly correct about that one table. It is like 90% of the space. When I ran the vacuum I did not shutdown Lemmy. Now I know.
Yeah, that worked magically!
You really don’t want to do a vacuum full on the live DB, it will lock everything. While useful and necessary I think, you have got to plan down time for it. Or your site is going to be inaccessible anyway.